Once more into the breach.....

There are several good reviews on the Star Trek DVD collection floating around the web these days. Most of them give it stellar marks, and praise the show for being ahead of its time in both plot development and special effects. What a lot of reviews fail to take into account is how good of a DVD RELEASE this actually is. I'd like to focus more on this aspect, than on the finer points of plot.

First of all, let me say that I am a huge Star Trek fan, so it goes without saying that the episodes themselves are very entertaining. Though the first season is a bit raw, many of the episodes have great creative genius behind them. Some of my favorite episodes of all time were aired in season 1, including "Justice", "The Neutral Zone", and "Symbiosis." It is very rewarding and interesting to be able to watch them all in the order they aired and examine the progression of character and plot development throughout the series. For plot and discussion and examination, you can read any of the other fine epinions reviews. I'd like to get to the nitty gritty of how the DVD release was presented.

The DVD box set itself is very nicely packaged. The 7 discs fold out into a huge accordion that also houses a small booklet with a picture of the crew and brief bios on the crew members. I was hoping there would be more printed material included with the box set, but only a small leaflet is present.

Each disk contains 4 episodes, and herein lies the first problem I saw with the set. Due to the enormous amount of information they packed on each disk, the video quality suffers considerably. The images look compressed and oftentimes grainy. If any of you have ever watched a VCD or downloaded a DIVX movie, you'll know what I'm talking about. This may not bother some people, but as a computer geek and quality critic, I was very disappointed. After all, Paramount is offering an MSRP of 130 dollars for this set. Although you can find it for under 100 if you shop around, this is not pittance. For that kind of money, they could have spread the episodes over 14 disks instead of 7 and alleviated the video quality problem. Fortunately, sound quality does not suffer at all, and in fact all of the episodes have been digitally remastered with Dolby Digital 5.1 channel audio.

The extras on this box set consist of 4 featurettes which are nestled comfortably on the last disc. All of them focus on different aspects of the production and they interview everyone from Rick Berman to Patrick Stewart. They are quite interesting, but the running length of all four put together is less than one hour. I was disappointed to find there are no running commentaries or other extras of any kind on any of the other discs. Once again, given the scope of this box set and the price point, there was a lot more they could have done in the way of extras.

I have purchased the first four box sets and they all follow this same basic format, so I see no need to write separate reviews on each of them. Trekkies owe it to themselves to own these collections. It presents Trek as it was meant to be seen and heard. Just be aware that you might find you're overpaying a bit for what is essentially a very minimilist release.